David Markson R.I.P.

I've never read any David Markson. But when I read he died early last week, I recalled that I had an unread book of his somewhere in my bookshelves. I searched for it and found it, discovering to my surprise that it was a signed copy (those who know me know I separately shelve signed books; I'd missed this one somewhere). My American experimental Po-Mo has not strayed far beyond Barthelme and Foster Wallace, but of course I'm going to read this book, and his much-hailed masterpiece Wittgenstein's Mistress.

My impression so far has been, thank goodness someone can do this well for the rest of us who might have really sucked at it.

By the way, from what I've read so far, I'll take Ben Marcus over Jonathan Safran Foer any day, on this point.

Barry Hannah 1942-2010

"Well, yeah, I’m proud, but I tell you, the older you get as a writer, the more modest you get and the more you should shut up. You’re less arrogant, with good reason. There’s just a hell of a lot going on in the world. You’ve not penetrated too many consciousnesses. When I was twenty-one, I thought that you write a book and the world paid attention, man. There was no doubt. Then you grow up and you see that that’s not it at all. That you have to love it itself. And that you’re working for about the top 3 percent, max, of America. And they’re literary. That’s not the nuclear scientists, who ain’t going to read you. You’re working with literary folks, 3 percent of the reading public, and it becomes a tiny club and you should have more modesty.

But Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, that’s what you should shoot for. Beckett. The best of Beckett’s prose, you know. If you can get that close to the heart, and that honesty, with some music, why write the other kind of books that many people can agree with and not be disturbed by? I don’t like the books where everybody shakes their heads and says, How true, how true. I want to be in a region that’s beyond good and evil. Where it’s just fireworks or Mozart. Where there’s just no explanation. That’s what McCarthy and Faulkner do for me. It’s better than any review. That’s what I’m after."

-from The Pleasures of Influence: Conversations with American Male Fiction Writers

RIP David Foster Wallace, cont.

I've tried a couple of times to write a full post, but keep coming up short. At any rate, I wanted to link to this from the NY Times Obit, which I just can't get past:

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.” |NY Times|

Though I am an immense fan of his work, I never met David Foster Wallace. I did, however, study with Professor Wallace, and T.A. for him in both medical ethics and introduction to ethics. Seeing that quote there I can't help but be reminded of the many times these sorts of cases were discussed in class, and the extraordinary compassion and empathy that Professor Wallace consistently displayed when talking about these sorts of cases.

And that's where I get stuck.